TV comedy gives UCLA actor a shot at fame
By Meropi Peponides
June 11, 2006 9:00 p.m.
The city of Los Angeles is full of struggling actors. After
graduation, Sunkrish Bala will not be one of them.
Bala, a graduating UCLA theater student with an emphasis in
acting, has a supporting role in a pilot for a new television show
called “Notes from the Underbelly.” The show has been
picked up by ABC for the upcoming fall season.
“If there’s a Lucy and Ricky couple, I’m (part
of) the Fred and Ethel couple,” Bala said. “The whole
show is about couples deciding to get pregnant and have babies and
the comedic adventures that follow. I’d watch it, I
think.”
The first episode of the initial 12 will air September 1, with
filming starting in August. If the show is well received,
“Notes from the Underbelly” will be able to finish the
season with another 12 episodes.
“We usually find that out about halfway through shooting
the first 12,” Bala said. “So we’re at least on
until January or February, and then if it goes well, we’re on
indefinitely.”
In February of his third year at UCLA, Bala had a guest spot on
“CSI: New York,” his first TV appearance.
“It just happened because I started auditioning,”
Bala said. “(My career) was slowly building after
that.”
Since then, Bala has appeared on television shows such as
“Grey’s Anatomy” and “Will and
Grace.”
Being both a full-time student and a professional actor leaves
less time for academics. However, Gary Gardner, a UCLA professor
who taught classes in playwriting and theater history to Bala, does
not see theater students’ outside work as necessarily
detrimental.
“I want (the students) to be trained. I don’t want
them to be dumb actors, but Sunkrish is very smart,” he said.
“The people we’re talking about are some of our
brightest students. They’ve done all their work fine, and
they’ve been keeping an eye out for their professional
career.”
For Bala, it’s about compromises.
“It may have cut down on party time,” he said,
laughing. “You got to be willing to not get the best grade
and you got to be willing to miss auditions for
midterms.”
Because of an increasing amount of professional work in the past
two years, however, Bala chose not to continue with acting classes
at UCLA.
“I had to decide whether I wanted to act professionally or
continue training,” he said. “It worked out for
me.”
Although Bala has managed to establish himself in the industry,
he does not consider his success to be unique.
“There are so many actors that come out of (this program)
that are so good and it’s just the nature of this business
that I happen to have lucked out and gotten an early start. But I
promise, you will be seeing the rest of my class in the coming
years and months,” Bala said. “The class of 2006 is
definitely going places.”
